甘明斯第12個墨爾本杯冠軍
Bart Cummings was a racing legend long before he won his 12th Melbourne Cup at Flemington today, just a week shy of his 81st birthday.
The octogenarian, taught the training art in his home town of Adelaide by his Melbourne Cup-winning father Jim Cummings, has long been regarded with his late contemporaries Tommy Smith and Colin Hayes as one of the three finest trainers in Australian racing history.
The trio, along with former greats James Scobie and Jack Holt, were inaugural inductees into the Australian racing Hall of Fame in 2001.
But, after today's historic victory some 55 years since he began training in his own right, James Bartholomew Cummings must surely stand alone as the greatest.
Among all his achievements, it is his amazing record in the Melbourne Cup that has lifted him to a pedestal no others will ever share.
Having been the strapper for his father's Melbourne Cup winner Comic Court in 1950, Cummings had a fair idea what training a horse to win Australia's greatest race was all about.
It took him 13 years before he won his first Melbourne Cup in 1965, but in the next decade he won the race five times to equal the record established in its formative years by the inaugural winning trainer Etienne De Mestre between 1861 and 1878.
Light Fingers, beating stablemate Ziema by a nose in 1965, started the Cup tradition for Cummings in 1965 and was followed by Galilee (1966), Red Handed (1967) and dual winner Think Big in 1974 and 1975.
He added another two Melbourne Cups in the 1970s with Gold and Black (1977) and Hyperno (1979) but then endured an 11-year drought until his next winner Kingston Rule (1990).
The Melbourne Cups of the 1990s were dominated by Cummings with wins by Let's Elope (1991), Saintly (1996) and Rogan Josh (1999).
Some eight years on he claimed his twelfth with Viewed, and says the aim is to now win a “baker's dozen” and maybe more.
“Somebody told me I was good at winning this race, and I can say it's something you get used to,” Cummings said with a touch of his renowned dry wit.
Think Big, Saintly and Viewed have been raced by Malaysian diplomat Dato Tan Nim Chan, a stalwart client of the Cummings stable who the trainer describes as the luckiest owner he has known.
Viewed and his other runner Moatiza took the number of horses Cummings has started in Melbourne Cups to 78, producing 12 wins, six seconds including five quinellas and three thirds.
This Melbourne Cup marks his 250th success in Group One races, second to Tommy Smith's Australian record, among more than 700 stakes victories and was his first G1 success since Sirmione won the Australian Cup in March.
Cummings after training out of Adelaide for 15 years, established stables at Flemington, now known as Saintly Place, in 1968 and set up stables at Randwick in Sydney, known as Leilani Lodge, in 1975.
He has been a Sydney resident since that time and while he has won only one Sydney training title he has won 11 premierships in Melbourne and Adelaide. His Sydney title in 1988-89 coincided with premierships in Victoria and South Australia, the first and only time a trainer has won all three in the same season.
He has trained nine winners of the Australian Racehorse eof the Year title, became the first trainer in the British Commonwealth to train the earners of over one million dollars in prize money in one season in 1974-75, the first to train over $6 million in a season in 19987-88, was honoured with the Order of Australia in 1982 for his services to the racing industry and was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 1991.
He has won Victoria's Racing Media Personality of the Year, was also honoured with the Centennial Medal in 2000 and in the same year carried the Olympic torch down the Flemington straight.
In 2004, Cummings was presented with Life Membership of the Victoria Racing Club, the first time a trainer has received such an honour and a fitting tribute to a racing legend.
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